


The Fire Warms- Sivagami

by arpita



Series: Agni Parva [6]
Category: Baahubali (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Slight Divergence maybe?, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 13:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19199473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arpita/pseuds/arpita
Summary: Sivagami Devi enters Maahishmati as a newly-wed bride, and finds her husband being not ver.y satisfied with their wedding





	The Fire Warms- Sivagami

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MayavanavihariniHarini](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayavanavihariniHarini/gifts).



> 1\. The character of SIvagami Devi here is as per my comprehension of the Baahubali movies. No part of the representation, or the backstory here is derived from Anand A. Neelakantan's book on the same character.

_Impressive, but not as much as I would have hoped,_ Sivagami thinks the first time she enters the fabled land of Maahishmati as a newlywed bride to Bijjaladeva. To her, it was majestic, indeed, but the actual grandeur of her wedding, and the town, seemed, for her part, underwhelming.

The only part that she liked about the wedding was the people that she was to be a part of. They were all warm, and welcoming, quite akin to the ones in her own land. She found that she could well be a part of them from what it seemed. The Royal Family welcomed her with open arms as well. The King was an amicable, elderly father figure, in semblance to her own father, and the younger Prince, the much-famed Crown Prince of Maahishmati was a young, affable man with a warm disposition.

All in all, she isn’t dismissive of her new household, as she enters it, scrutinising the grandiose palace as her retinue leads her in for the completion of other bridal rituals. And she writes off her negligible discomfort as quintessential bridal jitters. As the day progressed, she finds her husband being the irritable one, as he performed his martial rituals with a sense of boredom, coupled with, what she felt, some sort of suppressed anger.

She wonders if it has something to do with their alliance, but she chooses not to voice her thoughts just now. Post-marital privacy would allow the opportune time for such conversations.

***

As night falls, Sivagami found the first thing that struck her attention. A mighty fire, grander than anything that she had seen before in her entire life lit the entire Palace of Maahishmati as the flames burnt high atop the Palace. The Agni Kunda, as they called it, seemed to be the first object of fascination of the newlywed bride. She could catch a full view of the majestic fire right from the casement of her chamber, and there was a phantom, something, something that literally lay beyond any explanation that drew her to it.

As she waited for her husband to enter their chamber, she finds that the fire holds her attention longer than it should.

_As if Agnideva could speak,_ she muses in admiration. 

-“Buffoons!” an angry grunt broke her reverie. She turned around to find her husband being the owner of the disgruntled voice. 

Bijjaladeva finally got to have a full glimpse of the woman that was his wife in the entire day. However, in his resentment and anger, he didn’t even bother to cast a second glance at her before wordlessly striding off to bed.

“Does something bother you, Your Highness?” Bijjala hears a feminine voice enquire as he took his amulet off.

He turned once again to face her.

“Doesn’t _this_ bother you?!” he snaps at her, “All this useless pandemonium?!”

“Do you resent the wedding?” Sivagami asked him back.

Bijjala looked into her eyes. Not once had he given a thought to the wedding that was his. To him, it seemed like it was another formality that his father was complying with, and unlike his brother’s coronation, this was one time that he couldn’t help being a part of it. Likewise, he had expected his wife to be the submissive, docile kind, the kind that most men usually were indifferent to.

But to his surprise -unexpectedly pleasant- he found that the eyes that had confronted him were far from docile. They had a held-back, fiery, sort of warm to them. Her voice seemed to hold her strength, even in her sobriety, and her stature, unlike most newlywed brides, was erect, which he thought was reflective of her being formidable.

“My Lord?” Sivagami’s voice broke into his train of inspective thought.

Bijjaladeva took a deep breath. 

“No.” the answer is brief, yet weary. 

“Then what is it, Your Highness?” she asks him, yet again.

“Don’t _you_ resent the wedding?”- Bijjala returns her question to her, albeit in a manner which seemed like concern.

Sivagami thinks she might have struck a chord with her husband, as his arm, - _and her eyes_ \- moved in sync to his deformed hand.

“No, My Lord.” she answered. “I do not.”

Intelligently enough, she chose not to bring up the subject of his hand, on their wedding night. That hand might as well have been the reason for a lot of things that had invited his ire towards other tender matters. Given her assumptions, there would be another plethora of discoveries that she would make in the course of her being his wife.

Her husband neared her.

“Tell me,” he said, “What would you wish to know about your new family?”

Sivagami smiled.

“Tell me about that fire.” she asked pointing out of the window.

“Oh, _that_ ”- Bijjala began with yet another sneer, “That is yet another fable of our sacred, mighty, Maahishmati.” 

She doesn’t miss the scorn, and the snort at the end of the sentence. And yet, her expression betrayed her puzzlement at her husband’s perpetual scorn which had only momentarily been replaced by a minuscule of concern.

“Forgive me,” Bijjala resumed his composure quickly, “The exertions have been a little too much for me.”

Sivagami nodded in agreement. A valid mask, nonetheless, she thinks.

“Agnishwara watches over us, we believe,” Bijjala said, “Centuries ago, he had been besotted with a Princess of our Land,” he continued. 

“It is said, that He flared up in ecstasy when she was near Him. Such was her beauty, and such His fascination, that the moment the Princess distanced herself from His flames, The Lord would either burn up in a fierce rage, endangering all around Him, or dim Himself to subject others to the wrath of the cold.”

Sivagami listened with interest. She wished to know if this particular Princess was just a momentary fascination to the moody Lord of Fire, or if he really was in love with her.  
“To stay in close proximity to the Princess, The Lord took the guise of a Brahmin,” Bijjala narrated further. 

“So he did love her, after all.” Sivagami said.

“Of that I have no confirmation,” Bijjala laughs, “But for all of His Lordship, the King, Nila was his name, caught his ruse and sought to imprison him.”

“Imprison a God?!” Sivagami asked incredulously.

“Well, it is quite understandable,” Bijjala says, “He tried to trick him. And as for trying to imprison a God, Nila wasn’t really the first, was he?”

_Of course he wasn't,_ Sivagami concurred as she remembered the Mahabharata, where The Kaurava Scion, Suyodhana, had tried to imprison Krishna Himself, when the latter had come to Hastina as an ambassador of peace.

_And of course, they had borne the consequences._

"What followed?" she asked.

"Of course, there were consequences,"- Bijjala spoke, "To incur the wrath of Agnishwara, and to deny him what he wanted. But eventually," - he breathed, - "The King saw sense.

_But of course he did,_ Sivagami laughed to herself. 

"So Agnishwara eventually offered to watch over the King's land, for an eternity," - Bijjala narrated further, - "and that, precisely is the reason why you see the fire up there."

So the Fire does watch over all, Sivagami mused as she looked up yet again. 

She wondered if the Royal Family lived up to its duties of being the Watchkeepers of Maahishmati under His watch.

_Little did she know, that the Lord had marked her for a higher purpose as well. Only time would tell, which way the new bride of Maahishmati was headed to._


End file.
